After reading “Toward a Composing Model of Reading” by Tierney and Pearson, I definitely think I used all five of the functions of writing. They listed the five functions to be: planning, drafting, aligning, revising, and monitoring. These are functions that I used every time I am writing without really thinking anything of it. This is something that is so ingrained in our minds since we first started writing in elementary school. We’ve been taught the process of writing when we learned to write and since the very beginning it’s something we’ve all had to do. Because of this its second nature and is something I do every time without thinking about it at all.
Applying this to our first project writing a Wikipedia article, I absolutely went through all five of the steps. First, I started with planning. As described by Tierney and Pearson this phase includes behaviors such as setting the purpose for writing, evaluating current state of knowledge on the subject, narrowing the topic and/or goals, and self-questioning. I planned by finding a suitable topic that I could find a decent amount of information about it. I looked thought the requested articles page and searched for things that could be easily researched questioning how easily it would be to find reliable sources on the topic. Once I narrowed in on one specific topic to write on and started doing my research. This is about the time when I switched from the planning stage to the drafting stage. As I found and read different reliable sources I started to take notes of important points to include in my article. I then drafted these points into a very rough draft of my writing.
I quickly switched into the aligning phase. In this phase the writer aligns there writing in a way that flows and makes sense. This phase has everything to do with the writer’s ability to make the writing readable and coherent. In this phase, I came up with the subtitles I was going to uses in my article and started deciding which different bits of information and paragraphs were going under which subtitles. I aligned my article in a way that I thought would be easy to read and understand. The aligning phase kind of works hand in hand for me because as I aligned my article in a more reader friendly way; I also revised the way my article was written so that the sentences made sense when I moved them and so that it all flowed together. I read over the sentences as I was moving and aligning them and as I did this I was checking for grammatical and logical errors. After I was finished aligning I continued to revise till I felt the article was as good as I was going to get it.
Now that I have finished my article and submitted it for review, I am in the monitoring stage. I am checking to see if it’s acceptable and gets created as an article. Also I check to see if I get any feedback on my writing and what could improve it. Also part of the monitoring process in this class is waiting to see my grade for the project and how it was perceived by Matt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Calasan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riley_Fox_Murder
I did think it was interesting, thinking of my article, of how we do go through the steps: Unconsciously. It seems that most of us go through them without thinking about it. Elementary was good for something I guess, it burned the process into our minds so it became second nature, making it easier for us to flow through the writing.
ReplyDeleteI think you made an interesting point when you brought up the fact that these five functions have been engraved in our minds since we were elementary school writers. I, like you, have been writing using these five functions since I was in middle school. I'm in middle childhood education here at Ohio University, and your comment really hit home for me. It is extremely important to develop some kind of writing skills as a child, so that at the university level we can produce good writing using the five functions discussed by Tierney and Pearson.
ReplyDeleteThis blogpost is very similar to mine. I agree so much that these five steps Tierney and Pearson describe, is second nature when it comes to writing any sort of paper. I was personally confused about aligning and how it differed from drafting, but I reading your post makes it sort of make a little more sense. I like that in the aligning stage you chose to create your subtitles for the article. Since my article was already created and I was editing information already there, I found the subtitles fitting and left them alone.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that several of these phases have been burned into our minds since our elementary school days. When I looked over these terms, I felt i hadn't utilized them at all. It was only in hindsight and consideration that I realized i had been doing so along.
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